The Tie That Binds(67)

Meanwhile my daughter had finished coloring their train tickets. She wanted to start. She was ready for the pretense of seeing the country. But Lyman wasn’t ready yet. Far from it. So finally, out of boredom I suppose, Rena called Nancy—that’s what they called the dog—into the mess of the travel bureau to play with her while she waited. And that was too much for him. He thought he had reason to dislike the dog anyway. He came unhinged. He started shouting.

“Get that damn thing out of here! She don’t belong here with us.”

You understand he was like a frantic kid now, screaming and shouting. And Rena was saying, “Well, Nancy can stay in here if she wants to.”

“No, she can’t. She stinks, damn her. Get her out.”

“Nancy doesn’t either stink.”

“She does too. Don’t tell me, by God . . .”

“Do you, Nancy? Nooo, her doesn’t stink. Her’s a good old poochy.”

Rena was kneeling in front of the dog, talking baby talk into its grizzled face, patting its old head while the dog shut its eyes, shivering in pleasure, and then Lyman hit Nancy on the spine with his cane. There was a sharp crack, a yelp.

“By Jesus!” he yelled. “I bet that’ll move her.”

The dog did move too. It even managed a kind of waddling gallop; it ended up in the kitchen cringing and whimpering beside the stove. Rena, I gather, was just shocked at first. She had never seen an animal mistreated before; it was something new to her. Then she was mad, as outraged as any six-and-a-half-year-old girl can be. She began to shout back at him, crying up into his face that he was mean and old, that he was the one who stinked; she was not going to play travel with him ever again. She took off her green visor and threw it at him.

Then Edith was there too, in that crowded box-filled room at the west end of the house. But it was too late. Lyman was gone now, the poor old bastard; he was crazy with frustration, his eyes like new copper, red and insane, out-sized; he was flailing his cane around in the room, hitting anything, the desk, the boxes, the lamp, and before Edith could get Rena and herself out of the way he hit his sister sharp blows on the arms and back. “Get out!” he was screaming. “Get out of here.” They retreated to the kitchen. That’s when she called me in from the machine shed. You know the rest.

After that much had been told, when it was all accounted for, even if it didn’t make sense, because it wasn’t a question of that, we sat there on kitchen chairs staring at nothing for a while. The radio was playing the top forty from Denver, and there was the slow drip of rain outside. Finally Rena got up off Edith’s lap. She came over and stood between my knees. “Dad, I want to go home now,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Mom will be waiting supper for us.”

Rena went into the other room, put her coat on, and we could hear her saying good-bye to Lyman. Lyman was still standing fierce guard in the far doorway. He didn’t say anything. Rena came back into the kitchen and gave Edith a long hug.

“Go on out to the pickup now,” I told her. “I’ll be right out.”

“I want you to come too.”

“I am. Go ahead now.”

“Good-bye, Edith,” she said.

“Good-bye, sweetheart. Lyman didn’t mean to scare you. He loves you too, you know. We both do.”

“I guess he’s just sick,” Rena said. “Probably he’ll feel better tomorrow.”

Then she went outside. Edith was staring at the closed door; she looked small and defeated. Her face was white, colorless, pained; her gray hair had become dislodged from its knot. I felt as bad for her then as I ever have for anyone in my life.

“He just can’t help what he does,” she said.

“I know it,” I said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s not that simple. What am I going to do with him, Sandy? I won’t have him strapped down to a hospital bed. Or whatever they do now—sedate them with pills and shots to make them sleep all the time. I couldn’t stand that. And he’s mine to take care of.”

“There aren’t a lot of options,” I said.

“There must be something,” she said. “I’ve just got to think of it.”

I sure as hell didn’t have any answers. So I left then and Rena and I went home for supper. Rena didn’t go back to the Goodnoughs’ again by herself. In the next eight or nine months Mavis or I took her often to see Edith, to visit in the kitchen or to do things outside in the yard during the summer, but she didn’t play travel with Lyman anymore. Lyman had almost stopped playing travel himself. He managed, I think, to take a few brief imaginary trips to Denver, but that was about all. Of course all that time Edith was still taking care of him. With patience and kindness, and yes, love, too. Only you’d have to have seen that yourself. I don’t know how to tell you about it.





?11?

ALL I KNOW how to tell you is that sometime between March and December Edith Goodnough decided by herself what to do with her brother. She didn’t consult anyone. It isn’t the sort of thing you can discuss with anybody else. What in the hell are you going to say?—look here now, if I do this and this, do you think it’ll turn out all right? No, Edith made up her own mind. It had to be her own private, solitary decision.